It is unusual in biblical studies to encounter a monograph of this quality, combining sustained and high-caliber philological work with a broad hermeneutical agenda. Ken Brown's Vision is a modestly revised doctoral dissertation written at the Georg-August University in Göttingen under the joint supervision of Hermann Spieckermann and Nathan MacDonald (of Cambridge University).
The starting point of the analysis is the literally hair-raising vision of a spirit belonging to the divine circle reported in Job 4:12–21. According to the spirit, the deity finds fault with the angels, kal va-ḥomer with lowly human beings. N. H. Tur-Sinai (Torczyner), H. L. Ginsberg, G. V. Smith, and E. L. Greenstein, in particular, had advanced arguments maintaining that this vision, related early in the book of Job, is misplaced.Footnote 1 In the received text, it appears in the middle of the first discourse of Eliphaz. It should, however, be attributed to Job. Brown writes that he originally set out to disprove this thesis, which had been largely ignored by scholars, even though it was promulgated at first by two of the greatest modern Hebrew philologists, Tur-Sinai and Ginsberg. But as Brown studied the evidence and arguments more thoroughly—including, it should be mentioned to his credit, my lengthy Hebrew article (Greenstein 2005)—he concluded that the report of the vision was indeed misplaced and should be understood as the conclusion to Job's opening discourse (3:1–26).
Among the arguments supporting the attribution to Job are the following: the theology is much closer to Job's than to any of the friends’; it is Job who complains of nightmares; Eliphaz quotes a parody of the spirit's words back to Job (see 15:12–13, which introduce direct discourse); Elihu, who expressly seeks to refute Job, not the friends, quotes from the vision; Eliphaz in his first discourse responds to the vision; and Job refuses to suppress it (6:10). To these arguments Brown adds that Job's two revelatory experiences frame the dialogues in the book (but see already Greenstein 1996), and he performs a close linguistic and stylistic analysis to demonstrate that the rhetoric of the vision is highly Joban.
Having established on a sound philological basis that the vision is Job's, Brown shows that the vision is far more central and influential in the dialogues of Job than had hitherto been thought. The vision and its disturbing message are reflected throughout the discussion between Job and his companions, and they figure prominently in the speeches of Elihu and in Job's response to the divine speeches from the whirlwind. These interrelations Brown establishes through a meticulous study of the discourses.
The real innovation in Brown's study is the suggestion of a direct connection between the displacement of the vision in 4:12–21, which had been explained as a mechanical mishap, and the widely acknowledged disarray of several passages in the third, seemingly truncated, cycle of the dialogues, between chapters 25 and 27. Material in chapters 25–26 attributed there to Job appears to belong to Bildad, and material in chapter 27 attributed to Job appears to belong to one of the companions, probably Zophar, who otherwise has no discourse in the third and final cycle. Brown ingeniously suggests that the rearrangement of chapters 25 through 27 is not accidental but intentional—the work of a redactor who wanted to change the thrust of the book. Brown then proceeds to suggest, cleverly and sensitively, that the deliberate rearrangement of chapters 25–27 is connected to the dislocation of the terrifying vision of chapter 4. The vision was moved from its original place just as the speeches in chapters 25–27 were rearranged—and for a similar purpose: to bring the positions of Job, Eliphaz, and the other companions into closer alignment.
The new arrangement produces a new message: theological discussion is important, but it is also important to concede some points to the other side and to compromise. There is therefore a moral as well as theological lesson in the rearrangement, or second edition, of the biblical book of Job that was not fully there in the original work. Let me cite one sentence from the conclusion: “The end result is a work marked by deep tensions, in which the problem of God's justice is explored from multiple competing perspectives, and no clear resolution is found” (308).
In the postbiblical period, as Brown does well to indicate, we find a clear tendency to portray Job as more pious than he appears in the biblical text, to dull if not eliminate his sharp protests against divine injustice. Compare, for example, a nonsubversive Job in Ben Sira, Aristeas's Concerning the Jews, the Old Greek translation (where some noxious statements are inverted or deleted), the Testament of Job, the Epistle of James, and the Targum. In Brown's view, the domestication of Job begins already in the redaction of the biblical book. Actually, I would indicate, this development begins with the addition of the Elihu speeches (chapters 33–37 and see below), which, Brown agrees, was made prior to the rearrangement he proposes. The Elihu discourses anticipate those of the deity and add a measure of divine providence and justice in a self-portrait of God that is lacking in these benevolent theological traits (chapters 38–41).
Assuming that Brown is right about the revisionist redaction of the book, one looming question remains: Why does the redactor not simply excise the vision from chapter 4? This question Brown asks and answers: the vision is too central to the dialogues to be omitted. But if so, then another question can be asked: Why does the redactor not revise the dialogues more thoroughly, throughout the first and second cycles as well as through the third? Brown seems to acknowledge this problem, chalking it up to the complexity of the redaction, a desire to leave the original associations of the vision with Job at the same time that it has been relocated to the discourse of Eliphaz.
Brown's observations on the later editorial rearrangement of the book of Job are in line with a growing trend in biblical studies in general: finding fluidity in the shaping and transmission of texts before they became formally fixed in the “canon.” Thus, Brown's study of Job should make a salient impact on this welcome trend.
Although I very much admire the care and skill with which Brown builds his case, I remain unconvinced that the mix-up of passages is intentional. I am disturbed by the fact that the alleged deliberate revision is limited to the locus of the vision itself and to the end of the third cycle. I would also call attention to what I and David Clines have independently argued is another significant dislocation, bordering on the dislocations at the end of the third cycle of speeches.Footnote 2 The paean to wisdom in Job 28 begins out of nowhere and has no antecedent for the verb in verse 3; the overt message in verse 28 echoes the message in 37:24. For these and other reasons, Job 28 is properly understood as the conclusion of the Elihu discourses. In the second part of chapter 37 Elihu shows that divine wisdom is out of human reach in the sky, and, following convention, in chapter 28 he explains that divine wisdom is beyond human probing deep in the earth.
Job 28 is more radically dislocated than the passages that need rearranging in Job 25–27. To me it makes most sense to conclude that the misplacement of Job 4:12–21 was one localized accident of transmission, and that with the disruption involved in the insertion of chapter 28 in the wrong place, at the end of the third cycle, the final chapters of the third cycle underwent a kindred and connected disruption, in which a number of passages were reassembled out of their proper sequence. Hence the addition of the Elihu discourses led to some decomposition at that point in Job to which part of the Elihu material was dislocated.
One should be reminded that accidents of transmission are well documented. Among the tasks of the philologist is to reconstruct the text as convincingly as one can. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, restoring a text to its proper sequence does not do it violence but makes it once again intelligible. When I receive papers from my students and the pages are out of sequence (a not uncommon occurrence), I do not try to find some mystical meaning in the phenomenon. I assume that the authors meant to make sense, to write in a connected fashion, and I use my philological skills to rearrange the pages. There are almost always, in Job as in these papers, rhetorical or discourse features that support the rearrangement.
Ken Brown understands these principles well, but in arguing his thesis, he neglects to consider the problematic placement of Job chapter 28. Nonetheless, minus the claim of deliberate redaction, his arguments and analysis are important and for the most part convincing. His work is a substantial contribution to the study of Job.
